Читать книгу Dramatis Personæ - Symons Arthur - Страница 6

Often, mostly at night, a wheel of memory seems to turn in my head like a kaleidoscope, flashing out the pictures and the visions of my own that I keep there. The same wheel turned in my head when I was in Dieppe with Charles Conder, and it turned into these verses:

There's a tune burns, bums in my head,

And I hear it beat to the sound of my feet,

For that was the tune we used to walk to

In the days that are over and dead.

Another tune turns under and over.

And it turns in my brain as I think again

Of the days that are dead, and the ways she walks now,

To the self-same tune, with her lover.

I see, for instance, Mallarmé, with his exquisite manner of welcome, as he opens the door to me on the fourth floor of the Rue de Rome; I hear Jean Moréas thunder out some verses of his own to a waitress in a Bouillon Duval, whose name was Celimène, who pretended to understand them; Stuart Mérill at the Rue Ballier, Henri de Regnier silent under his eye-glass in one of the rooms of the Mercerie de France; Maurice Maeterlinck in all the hurry of a departure, between two portmanteaux. That was, I suppose, one of the most surprising meetings I ever had; for, as a matter of fact, one night in Fountain Court, it was in 1894—I was equally surprised when I opened his Alladine et Palamides which he had sent me with a dedication. After that time I saw him, during several years, fairly often in Paris and once in Rome, in 1903, when one performance was given of his Joyzelle—the most unsatisfactory performance I ever saw, and of certainly an unsatisfactory play. Nervous as he always was—he used, for one thing, to keep a loaded revolver always beside him in his bedroom—he shirked the occasion and went to Naples. I have never forgotten the afternoon when he read to me in his house in Paris whole pages of Monna Vanna. After I had left the house, I said to a certain lady who was with me: "Rhetoric, nothing but rhetoric! It may be obviously dramatic; but the worst of it is, all the magic and mystery of his earlier plays had vanished: there is logic rather than life."

It is very unfortunate for a man to be compared to Shakespeare even by his enemies, when he is only twenty-seven and has time before him. That is what has happened to Maurice Maeterlinck. Two years ago the poet of Serres Chaudes was known to only a small circle of amateurs of the new; he was known as a young Belgian of curious talent who had published a small volume of vague poems in monotone. On the appearance of La Princesse maleine, in the early part of 1890, Maeterlinck had an unexpected "greatness thrust upon him" by a flaming article of Octave Mirbeau, the author of that striking novel Sébastian Roch in the Figaro of August 24th. "Maurice Maeterlinck," said this uncompromising enthusiast,

"nous a donné l'oeuvre la plus géniale de ce temps, et la plus extraordinaire et la plus naive aussi, comparable—et oserai-je le dire?—supérieure en beauté à ce qu'il y a de plus beau dans Shakespeare.... plus tragique que 'Macbeth,' plus extraordinaire de pensée que 'Hamlet.'"

In short, there was no Shakespearean merit in which La Princesse Maleine was lacking, and it followed that the author of La Princesse Maleine was the Shakespeare of our age—the Belgian Shakespeare. The merits of Maeterlinck were widely discussed in France and Belgium, and it was not long before the five-act drama was followed by two pieces, each in one act, called L'Intruse and Les Aveugles. In May, 1891, L'Intruse was given by the Théâtre d'Art at the Vaudeville on the occasion of the benefit of Paul Verlaine and Paul Gauguin.

He is not entirely the initiator of this impressionistic drama; first in order of talent, he is second in order of time to another Belgian, Charles van Lerberghe, to whom Les Aveugles is dedicated. It was Van Lerberghe (in Les Flaireurs, for example) who discovered the effect which might be obtained on the stage by certain appeals to the sense of hearing and of sight, newly directed and with new intentions. But what is crude and even distracting in Les Flaireurs becomes an exquisite subtlety in L'Intruse. In La Princesse Maleine, in L'Intruse, in Les Aveugles, in Les Sept Princesses, Maeterlinck has but one note, that of fear—the "vague spiritual fear" of imaginative childhood, of excited nerves, of morbid apprehension. In La Princesse Maleine there is a certain amount of action—action which is certainly meant to reinvest the terrors of Macbeth and of Lear. In L'Intruse and Les Aveugles the scene is stationary, the action but reflected upon the stage, as if from some other plane. In Les Sept Princesses the action, such as it is, is "such stuff as dreams are made of," and is literally, in great part, seen through a window. From first to last it is not the play, but the atmosphere of the play, that is "the thing." In the creation of this atmosphere Maeterlinck shows his particular skill; it is here that he communicates to us the nouveau frisson, here that he does what no one has done before.

La Princesse Maleine, it is said, was written for a theater of marionettes, and it is, certainly, with the effect of marionettes that these sudden, exclamatory people come and go. Maleine, Hjalmar, Uglyane—these are no characters, these are no realizable persons; they are a mask of shadows, a dance of silhouettes behind the white sheet of the "Chat Noir," and they have the fantastic charm of these enigmatical semblances—"luminous, gem-like, ghost-like"—with, also, their somewhat mechanical eeriness. Maeterlinck has recorded his intellectual debt to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, but it was not from the author of Axel that he learned his method. The personages of Maeterlinck—are only too eloquent, too volubly poetical. In their mystical aim Villiers and Maeterlinck are at one; in their method there is all the difference in the world. This is how Sara, in Axel, speaks:—

Songe! Des coeurs condamnés à ce supplice de pas m'aimer! ne sont-ils pas assez infortunés d'être d'une telle nature?

But Maleine has nothing more impressive to say than this:—

Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! comme je suis malade! Et je ne sais pas ce que j'ai;—et personne ne sait ce que le médecin ne sait pas ce que j'ai; ma nourrice ne sait pas ce que j'ai; Hjalmar ne sait pas ce que j'ai.

That these repetitions lend themselves to parody is obvious; that they are sometimes ridiculous is certain; but the principle which underlies them is at the root of much of the finest Eastern poetry—notably in the Bible. The charm and the impressiveness of monotony is one of the secrets of the East; we see it in their literature, in their dances, we hear it in their music. The desire of the West is after variety, but as variety is the most tiring of all excesses, we are in the mood for welcoming an experiment in monotone. And therein lies the originality, therein also the success of Maeterlinck.

In comparing the author of La Princesse Maleine with Shakespeare, Mirbeau probably accepted for a moment the traditional Shakespeare of grotesque horror and violent buffoonery. There is in Maleine something which might be called Elizabethan—though it is Elizabethan of the school of Webster and Tourneur rather than of Shakespeare. But in L'Intruse and Les Aveugles the spiritual terror and physical apprehension which are common to all Maeterlinck's work have changed, have become more interior. The art of both pieces consists in the subtle gradations of terror, the slow, creeping progress of the nightmare of apprehension. Nothing quite like it has been done before—not even by Poe, not even by Villiers. A brooding poet, a mystic, a contemplative spectator of the comedy of death—that is how Maeterlinck presents himself to us in his work, and the introduction which he has prefixed to his translation of L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles of Ruysbroeck l'Admirable shows how deeply he has studied the mystical writers of all ages, and how much akin to theirs is his own temper. Plato and Plotinus, Saint Bernard and Jacob Boehme, Coleridge and Novalis—he knows them all, and it is with a sort of reverence that he sets himself to the task of translating the astonishing Flemish mystic of the thirteenth century, known till now only by the fragments translated into French by Ernest Hello from a sixteenth-century Latin version. This translation and this introduction help to explain the real character of Maeterlinck's dramatic work—dramatic as to form, by a sort of accident, but essentially mystical. As a dramatist Maeterlinck has but one note—that of fear; he has but one method—that of repetition. This is no equipment for a Shakespeare, and it will probably be some time before Maeterlinck can recover from the literary damage of so incredible a misnomer.

In the preface to the first volume of the collected edition, which should be read with attention by all who are interested in knowing Maeterlinck's opinion of his own work, we are told:—

Quant aux deux petites pièces... je voudrais qu'il n'y eut aucun malentendu à leur endroit. Ce n'est pas parce qu'elles sont postérieures qu'il y faudrait chercher une évolution ou un nouveau désir. Ce sont, à proprement parler, de petits jeux de scène, de courts poèmes du genre assez malheureusement appelé "opéra-comique" destinés à fournir, aux musiciens qui les avaient demandés, un thème convenable à des développements lyriques. Ils ne prétendent à rien d'avantage, et l'on se méprendrait sur mes intentions si l'on y voulait trouver par surcroit de grandes arrière-pensées morales ou philosophiques.

Maeterlinck may be taken at his word, and, if we take him at his word, we shall be the less disappointed. The two new plays are slight; they have neither the subtlety of meaning nor the strangeness of atmosphere which gives their quality of beauty and force to Pelléas et Mélisande and to Les Aveugles. Soeur Béatrice is a dramatic version of the legend which Davidson told effectively in theBallad of a Nun; Ariane et Barbe-Bleue is a new reading of the legend of Blue-Beard. Both are written in verse, although printed as prose. It may be remembered that Maeterlinck once admitted that La Princesse Maleine was meant to be a kind of verse libre, and that he had originally intended to print it as verse. As it stands now it is certainly not verse in any real sense, where—as Soeur Béatrice is written throughout on the basis of the Alexandrine, although without rhyme. The mute e is, as in most modern French verse, sometimes sounded and sometimes not sounded; short lines are frequently interspersed among the lines of twelve syllables. Here are a few lines, taken at random, and printed as verse;—

Tu ne me réponds pas? Je n'entends pas ton souffle...

Et tes genoux fléchissent.... Viens, viens,

n'attendons pas

Que l'aurore envieuse tende ses pièges d'or

Par les chemins d'azur qui mènent au bonheur.

That is perfectly regular twelve-syllable verse with the exception of the second line, where the final ent of fléchissent is slurred. Twelve-syllable unrhymed verse is almost as disconcerting and unknown in English as in French, but it has been used, with splendid effect, by Blake, and it is a metre of infinite possibilities. The metre of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (as Maeterlinck has finally decided to call it) is vaguer and more capricious; some of it is in twelve-syllable verse, some in irregular verse, and some in what can not be called verse at all. Take, for instance:—

Il parait qu'on pleurait dans les rues.—Pourquoi est-elle venue? On m'a dit qu'elle avait son idée. Il n'aura pas celle-ci.

The form in French is not, to our ears, successfully achieved; it seems to take a hesitating step upon the road which Paul Fort, in his Ballades Françaises has tramped along so vigorously, but in so doubtful a direction. Fort has published several volumes, which have been much praised by many of the younger critics, in which verse is printed as verse—verse which is sometimes rhymed and sometimes unrhymed, sometimes regular and sometimes irregular; and along with this verse there is a great deal of merely rhythmical prose, which is not more like verse than any page of Salammbo, or À Rebours, or L'Étui de Nacre. Now it seems to us that this indiscriminate mingling of prose and verse is for the good neither of prose nor of verse. It is a breaking down of limits without any conquest of new country. The mere printing of verse as prose, which Maeterlinck has favored, seems to us a travesty unworthy of a writer of beautiful prose or of beautiful verse.

Le Temple Enseveli is by no means equal, as literature or as philosophy, to Le Trésor des Humbles, or even to La Sagesse et la Destinée, but it is, like everything which Maeterlinck writes, full of brooding honesty of thought and of a grave moral beauty of feeling. It is the work of a thinker who "waits patiently," like a Christian upon divine grace, upon the secret voices which come to us out of the deepest places in our nature. He is absolutely open-minded, his trust and his skepticism are alike an homage to truth. If what he has to say to us is not always "la sagesse même," it is at least the speech of one who has sought after wisdom more heedfully than any other writer of our time.

Le Double Jardin is a collection of essays which form a kind of postscript to Le Temple Enseveli. They are somewhat less abstract, perhaps a little more casual, than the essays in that book, and are concerned with subjects as varied as The Wrath of the Bee, The Motor-Car, and Old-fashioned Flowers. Maeterlinck has never written anything in prose more graceful, more homely, and more human than some of these pages, particularly those on flowers. In The Leaf of Olive and in Death and the Crown he carries speculation beyond the limits of our knowledge, and "thinks nobly," not of the soul alone, but also of the intelligence of man in its conflict with the deadly, unintelligent oppositions of the natural forces of the world. Such pages are fortifying, and we can not but be grateful for what is plausible in their encouragement. But the larger part of the book is made up of notes by the way, which have all the more charm because they are not too systematically arranged.

All, it is true, have some link of mutual relation, and proceed from a common center. It is curious to see this harmonizing instinct at work in the present arrangement of the essay now called Éloge de l'Épée. The main part of this essay was published in the Figaro in 1902 under the title La Défense de l'Épée. In the Figaro it began with a merely topical reference:—

L'autre jour, dans un article charmant, Alfred Capus prévoyait la fin de l'honneur, du moins de "l'honneur salle d'armes" et des instruments qui le protègent.

Then followed two paragraphs questioning, a little vaguely,

si nous vivions dans une société qui nous protège suffisamment pour nous enlever, en toutes circonstances, le droit le plus doux et le plus cher à l'instinct de l'homme—celui de se faire justice à soi-même.

In the essay as we now read it the topical reference has disappeared, and more than three pages are occupied by a discussion of abstract right, of essential justice, which seems to set, strangely and unexpectedly, a solid foundation under a structure not visibly resting on any foundation sufficient for its support. As the essay now stands it has its place in a system of which it becomes one more illustration.

Few of the essays in this book will be read with more interest than that on The Modern Drama. It is a development of the ideas already suggested by Maeterlinck in two prefaces. In asking where, under the conditions of modern life, and in the expression of modern ideas, we can find that background of beauty and of mystery which was like a natural atmosphere to Sophocles and to Shakespeare, he is asking, not indeed answering, a question which is being asked just now by all serious thinkers who are concerned with the present and the future of the drama. This suggestive essay should be contrasted and compared with a not less suggestive, but more audaciously affirmative essay, De l'Évolution du Théâtre, given as a lecture by André Gide, and reprinted at the beginning of the volume containing his two latest plays Saul and Le Roi Candaule. Everything that Gide writes is full of honest, subtle and unusual thought, and this consideration of the modern drama, though it asks more questions, not answering them, seems also to answer a few of the questions asked by Maeterlinck.